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Expat's Eye
Print Edition> Expat's Eye
UPDATED: December 26, 2009 NO. 52 DECEMBER 31, 2009
On the Run
Adapting to Beijing's running scene
By MICHAEL GOLD
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(LI SHIGONG) 

I started running at age 14, inspired in equal parts by an incipient teenage desire for athletic greatness, the movie Personal Best, and the fact that all my classmates on sports teams got a free period during gym class. What a naive young Roger Bannister I was then, and over the next eight years of high school and college: a sprightly aggregation of unbreakable bones, unassailable cartilage, and spectacular lung capacity—thanks, in no small part, to the expansive flatlands and ocean-laced air of my Northern California upbringing. As a teenager, stuck inside this perpetual springtime, running eased itself into my spoiled body and hooked in to stay, becoming my sport, my obsession, my thing.

Since moving to Beijing after college in 2007, this body has been forced to adapt. Buffeted by the Beijing pollution, heat, cold, winds, crowds, traffic, rubble, and second-hand smoke (among other more Beijing-specific impediments to running, such as that awkward feeling you get as the only foreigner sporting sneakers, headphones, and a ratty, years-old muscle shirt, careening past an otherwise monotone—and slow-moving—populace), it's been tripped up, turned around, and tumbled over more times than I can count. Engaged in the delicate dance of avoid pot-hole here, stop short for honking car there, smile at Chinese gawker, speed up to outrun yapping dog, get stymied by construction zone dead-end, and finally start walking in frustration, it only took a few futile jaunts to realize that the Beijing streets are about as amenable to jogging on as the surface of Mars.

Not to say that I haven't had a few curiously inspiring experiences out there on the hard, gray pavement. One warm June day in 2008, I set out to take a running tour of the still-mired-in-construction Olympic Green, totally unsure of how far I'd get or when I'd be forced to turn around. Though I may be a pretty bad amateur sleuth, passing up every chance to scale that ratty fence around the hockey field or clamber over that giant pile of rubble separating me from the Water Cube, I proved myself a pretty good purveyor of Olympic spirit that afternoon. As I passed along the east road of the Bird's Nest, Jay-Z blasting between my ears, a small gaggle of Chinese primary school boys started trotting alongside all the way to the Fourth Ring Road, smiling like they'd just been passed the torch from Li Ning, the Chinese sports icon who lit the Beijing Olympic Games' flame on August 8, 2008. Wrapped up in my run, I didn't stop to introduce myself or glean their motives—maybe it was a gym class warm-up; maybe the maple leaf on my hat led them to think I was representing Canada in the big games; maybe they'd just watched Forrest Gump and were making fun of me. In any case, I'm glad I didn't stop and ruin that verve, that synergy, that brief moment of running as our shared second language.

Overall, though, my Beijing street runs are reserved only for days when someone's slipped a little extra adrenaline into my morning tea. Yet, as I've grown more acquainted with the city, I've discovered its largely untapped mine of outdoor running gold: the public parks. From the meticulously landscaped and exquisitely level trails of the Temple of Heaven (also an enclave of Beijing's elderly jogging elite, so it seems) to the rocky and undulating yet mercifully crowd-free paths of the Old Summer Palace, each one is a new place to sweat out the day's stresses. In particular, the stunning new Olympic Forest Park has proven a spectacular place to smash out some shoe rubber—its eye-pleasing, curiously exotic greenery, wide, mildly hilly lanes, and perfect loop, just a hair over 5 km, have drawn me time and again back to this little slice of Central Park in north Beijing.

Just one challenge remains for this plucky speed freak: the Beijing Marathon. I've never participated in a marathon before, preferring the serenity of my solo excursions to the chaos of such a mass migration of bodies. And yet I see Beijing as the oddly perfect place for a first go, with its geometrically oriented street plan, every major avenue flat as a plank and broad as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. On a clear day the sky here shines like a sapphire and the air is Antarctica-clean. Then again, waiting for my boyfriend to finish at the end of this year's competition, watching in jaw-dropping awkwardness as the promotional banners succumbed to the fierce autumn wind and slithered haphazardly across the race track, evading the attendants' frantic efforts at retrieval and obstructing more than a few runners' final few miserable, pain-wracked lunges, I started thinking about maybe just taking up swimming instead.

The author is an American living in Beijing



 
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